What's Happening

By Elizabeth Garlow, 
CEO, Charism Capital Fund

October 9, 2026, Adrian, Michigan – Long before "impact investing" had a name, women religious were already practicing it. Congregations like the Adrian Dominican Sisters directed their retirement funds and other savings into community development credit unions, loan funds, and the earliest community development financial institutions (CDFIs) – patient, affordable capital moving toward the neighborhoods and enterprises the conventional financial system wouldn't touch. It's an approach rooted in discernment, an openness to asking "what is enough of a return?" and the instinct to ask what capital owes to relationships rather than only to the financial bottom-line.

This legacy has had a profound impact, and it is evolving. Many of the congregations that pioneered this work are smaller now, with fewer sisters and leaner staff to carry it forward. 

Community investing was never simple to administer. It means dozens of investee relationships, each with its own documents, reporting expectations, and due diligence, spread across a landscape of projects and funds. Left to run its course, that kind of administrative weight could mean these programs struggle to stay afloat. Naming that clearly, though, is also what has made it possible to do something about it. 

At the same time, a different kind of barrier has been keeping newer people out of this kind of investing. Lay collaborators, foundations, families, and smaller congregations who want to put their own capital to work on mission keep running into challenges: private impact funds are usually built for large checks, with minimums in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and multi-year holding periods that some funders simply can't meet. Doing this work also requires expertise. None of this is a reason the work can't grow. It's simply been missing a front door. 

Those challenges – a legacy in need of continuity, and a newer generation locked out of community and impact investing by structural barriers – were the starting point for a participatory design workshop in May 2025, where sisters, lay practitioners, and other collaborators sat down together at the Casa Iskali in Chicago (a former Cabrini Retreat Center) to ask what it would take to lower those barriers without diluting what made this work distinctive. 

What came out of that room was the vision for Charism: a new nonprofit organization built to sponsor and manage a pooled fund of funds, moving capital toward partners both in the United States and in the Global South where communities are especially vulnerable in light of declining global aid. The fund is structured specifically so both legacy investors and newer investors – including smaller monasteries, congregations and organizations – can participate in the same kind of relationship-first investing the sisters have been practicing for more than 50 years. Charism launched this July with a founding circle of 12 investors, including 10 congregations of women religious, alongside ten donors, including the Adrian Dominican Sisters, who chose to be part of building it from the start.

The fund itself is just the vehicle. What makes this collaboration unique is the weaving together of multiple communities for a sustained practice of impact-first investing as a way of concretely living out our charisms to build a more life-giving economy. It helps all of us live our charisms in how we relate to money and to people, ensuring the treasures of these practices are handed down, tested, and re-embodied by whoever picks it up next – which, increasingly, means lay collaborators working alongside sisters. 

For the Adrian Dominican Sisters, whose own history in this work helped shape the field well before Charism existed, being part of the founding circle is a continuation of their work as well as planting seeds for the next evolution of how they express their mission and values through investing, in deep partnership with others. Charism is an exciting effort to build something all of us – women religious and others – can lean on.

Learn more. 
 

Caption for above feature photo: Standing near a display of Charism Capital are, from left, Bill Hatch, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Charism Capital; Molly Harmon, fund investor; Elizabeth Garlow, founder and CEO of Charism Capital; Sister Molly Brockwell, OSB, fund investor; and Sister Marilín Llanes, OP, fund investor and Director of the Portfolio Advisory Board. 
Photo Courtesy of Sister Marilín Llanes, OP